


Darning

by cadmean



Category: The Fifty Year Sword - Mark Z. Danielewski
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-Canon, c'mon at least one of the kids would've gone to the swordsmith after hearing that story, sibling bonds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-16 03:35:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18513085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadmean/pseuds/cadmean
Summary: She made her way up the mountain twice.





	Darning

**Author's Note:**

> The Fifty Year Sword is a story about a lot of things. It’s about a Halloween birthday party, and about the storyteller hired to entertain five children; it’s about a seamstress and the woman her husband cheated on her with. It’s about thoughtless malice, and trauma, and stitching.
> 
> But the book's backcover blurb reads: “One sword will kill a season. One will kill a country. One I’m making now will even kill an idea” and so it’s also about impossible swords and the terrible price you pay to wield them.

 

> Iniedia made her way up the mountain, and that first time, her hands were empty and her mind was set.

 

* * *

 

She makes her way up the mountain, her fingers wrapped tight around a sword hilt of sky-drenched satin.

The path is shorter than she remembers it being, but nevertheless when she finally makes it through the Valley of Salt and the Forest of Falling Notes – where she can still hear the voices of her three lost siblings –, it feels as if her very soul has been stripped clean by the ascent, with all of her faults laid bare for the whole world to see. Perhaps that was how the Man With No Arms forged blades that were so devastatingly suited to the people who came to find him; the soulstuff of his customers melded into something colder and stronger than any metal could ever hope to be.

No more swords for her, though. The one in her hand hangs heavy enough already.

Up near the top of the mountain range, where the air is thin and cold and it hurts to breathe, she eventually finds the swordsmith’s hut in exactly the same state she’d first seen it all those years ago when she’d first made the journey: a derelict, ruined beauty of a building with such clean-cut contours that it looks almost unreal in its sharpness against the wind-buffeted mountainside.

That wind tears at her as she makes her way over to the hut’s door; it claws at her face and grabs at the worn hems of her coat. She’s wearing a scarf made from the same yellow yarn Chintana once used to sew up the holes in her skirts – there’s patches in it now, little squares of other colors she’s sown in herself over the last few years. As the scarf whips around her face and shoulders in the wind, those patches provide the only flashes of color against the stark, bleached mountainside.

Once she reaches the door, of course, the wind stops entirely.

The door to the hut swings open before she can even properly raise her hand to knock. There is only a brief moment of hesitation before she accepts the invitation and steps across the threshold and into the hut itself.

> “What do you want?” the man – and he must be the Man With No Arms the Storyteller told them about so many years ago because, even with the door opened only a small sliver, Iniedia could well see that he had no arms at all hidden away underneath that tunic of his – said, his voice strangely youthful despite the many years that had evidently taken their toll on him.
> 
> Iniedia thought the question must be rhetorical, because really, there was only one reason why she would be here: “I’ve come for a sword.”

The Man With No Arms is sitting in front of a sweltering forge fire, stoking the flames and occasionally turning over the blades nestled within the smoldering coals. He only half turns his head to consider her, still standing there right in the middle of the doorway – and she wishes she could move, but her limbs feel so heavy with the weight of close to a decade of ill-spent days bearing down on them.

“Well?” the Man With No Arms eventually says.

She swallows, her throat suddenly lined with glass. With more effort than she could have ever imagined it would take, she takes a step towards him. Another. And another, until she is finally standing right in front of him, with the heat of the fire warming her soaked clothes.

She swallows again, this time welcoming the stone-rough sting of regret that comes with it. “I’ve come to return the sword.”

 _Your sword_ , she would have said eleven years ago; and _my sword_ , for the last ten. Now, here, she pulls it out from the scabbard on her hip with a flourish born from years of practice.

It is a beautiful sword as long as the morning horizon; sleek, slender, as sharp as anything she has ever seen. Years ago she’d unthinkingly reached out with her good hand and grabbed at it, and when her fingers had closed around the satin-wrapped hilt her fate had been sealed – even now, as she offers it to the Man With No Arms, she finds it difficult to even think of relinquishing her hold on it.

> “Your sword,” he said, somewhat slyly, with a malignant, coy little undertone to it that Iniedia chose not to hear, “is a rare one. I’ve forged many that cut lives, and more that cut less tangible things. They’re swords of a unique, singular purpose, all of them; but yours—“
> 
> Iniedia gripped the sword tightly, her knuckles going white with the force of it. “ _What about_ my sword?”
> 
> The Man With No Arms smiled at her. “It is a sky-hilt sword, and it cuts the kinds of things you can’t touch with your bare hands or even with your mind. It kills exactly what you want it to cut: relationships.”
> 
> She had lied to Micit about what she wanted the sword for, of course. _Grief_ , Iniedia had told her youngest sister, _I want it to cut out my grief_. And Micit, who was still mourning their other three siblings, lost to various causes, had not thought to question her answer.
> 
> “And it will work? Truly?” Iniedia asked now.
> 
> “Of course,” the Man With No Arms replied. “My swords cut true. Every time.”
> 
> Iniedia considered the sky-hilt sword, let her eyes sweep up and down the thin blade. It would cut her loose, that blade. It would set her free. “Perfect. What do you want for it?”
> 
> And the Man With No Arms, he smiled.

He doesn’t take the sword immediately. In fact, the longer she holds it out to him the more uncomfortable he looks – he doesn’t meet her eyes, and when the Man With No Arms does finally get up from his chair, he makes no move whatsoever to reach out for the blade he gave her so many years ago. This—it’s not the kind of reaction she had expected when she’d thought about this moment during her ascent, but there is an odd sort of relief that comes with it.

Like she's made the right decision after all.

It is with a grim determination, therefore, that she slowly, decisively, uncurls her fingers and lets the sword fall.

They both watch it drop to the floor, and in those scant few fractions of a second before it it hits the worn stones with a dull clatter, she almost sees the sword’s whole sordid history drop out of her hands with it. It’s not gone – it’ll never be gone, not with what she’s done, not with the connections she’s severed with it – but it feels like she’s standing taller without the weight of it at her hip already.

The silence that's stretching between her and the Man With No Arms is absolute for one single, beautiful moment. Then she drops her head to hide the self-deprecating little smile spreading across her lips, and breathes, “Well then. _Well then_.”

“You could always take another sword down with you,” the Man With No Arms starts up, sounding almost hesitant for once. And perhaps it’s only now that it finally shines through, or perhaps it has always been there and she just didn’t notice it the first time around – but there is a hint of malice to the way he says it, a sliver of predatory anticipation to the smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “One that I’m currently forging has a short little snippet of a blade, and it will kill the color of Autumn. A set of cloud-swords I finished just last week will encompass the sky for you, and they’ll—“

“I don’t need another sword,” she says, and the words feel true in her very soul. “I’m done with mine, and I certainly didn’t come here to replace it with something else.”

The Man With No Arms doesn’t seem to have any immediate answer to this, and so, after another moment, she turns on her heel and makes for the hut’s door once more. Her hand is already reaching out for the door’s handle when she hears a wheezing, half-choked scream of rage from behind her.

“Returning the sword won’t get you back the price you paid for it,” the Man With No Arms shouts after her, his voice rough like the worn edges of the mountains he lives in. “You will never get your name back; you’ll never see them—“

She’s out of the door in an instant and slams the flimsy thing shut behind herself without looking back, and the howling winds buffeting the rocky cliffs around her cut off the Man With No Arms as effectively as a mundane blade presumably would have.

A deep breath shudders through her, filling her lungs properly for what feels like the first time in over a decade. She can’t help a quick glance back now after all, just to be safe, but the Man With No Arms doesn’t seem to be following her – instead, over her shoulder, the hut suddenly looks like a much smaller, broken unimpressive little thing.

She doesn’t look back again.

 

* * *

  

> Micit was still waiting for her at the bottom of the mountain pass, huddled in several layers of coats and wearing that ridiculous hat she’d knit for herself. Her face visibly lit up when she spotted Iniedia pushing her way through the low-hanging branches of the pine trees.
> 
> “How did it go, then?” she asked once Iniedia had drawn closer. “Did you get a—“
> 
> The sky-hilt sword, Iniedia noted, cut as swiftly and devastatingly as she had hoped it would.

 

* * *

 

She makes her way back down the mountain.

Her hands are empty.

Her mind is set.

The phonecall going out to her last remaining sibling is picked up almost instantly.

“Micit? It’s—me.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> If you’re interested in checking out the canon there’s of course a book version you can read, and as usual for the author it’s very pretty visually; but there’s also a really cool live-reading of the story I can only recommend and which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2YHNvXFY9k


End file.
